Everyday Memoire

[em][me]

Ruby jumps up on the desk between my arms and brushes her tail across my face. I surprise her, hugging her tight to my chest and burying my face into the gray fur on her neck. She doesn't struggle. She rests there like that, with her body weight against me, purring ever so lightly and nonchalantly looking around the room over my shoulder. I hug her hard as the tears come. She lets out a little squeak, reminding me of her size, and I drop my arms. I picture her locked in the house, pacing back and forth on the counter as water floods under the door, washes across the hardwood. I picture her with her paws pressed against the windows of a car as the pressure of water outside threatens to break the glass at any second. Trying to get out. Trying to get away. Panicking. My stomach is sick.

I wonder what goes through the minds of a thousand people in the final moments of their lives; I wonder if they pray or mumble one final regret as the noise and stench of trillions of gallons of filthy water come gushing along fields, ready to swallow up their cars, their homes, their lives, all without slowing down. I think, "Surely this many people must die every day in the world, and look at me, in tears over and over again."

I think, "There's no harm in mourning them." I feel a connection with them as humans, to know their end has come, and all at once like that. A mass execution by nature's wrath. No, not "no harm". They must be. They must be mourned. This is my way of rationalizing the way it's making me feel. But to mourn for every soul to have ever perished in my lifetime? I don't have it in me.

I imagine waiting in the middle of the highway, seeing an entire ocean eating the land in front of me at a pace no life could outrun. I imagine looking up at the sky, wishing a hand would appear and lift me to safety, because where is there to go but the sky once the earth is devoured by sea?

The weight of my head presses my nose flat against the shower wall and each particle of hot steam bursts on the roof of my open mouth. With my eyes closed, I reach my hand behind me, feeling for the nozzle, and turn it just a centimeter more toward "Hot". The pads of my feet feel like the bone is about to press through the skin, the small of my back sings under the stream of hot water, my eyelashes are lead weights on the lid. I smell woodsmoke rinsing from my hair.

I remember, as a child, being transfixed by moving water. Specifically sitting alongside the creek behind my aunt's, only three houses up the street from our own, where it turned the corner into the Poorman's back yard and rushed hurriedly away downstream where I'd never--have still never--gone. When I was very small (and maybe it isn't even my memory, but a story I've been told and my mind put its own pictures to), my uncle laid concrete cylinders in the bank to form a little wall, laid two downed trees across the widest point, nailed wooden planks to them to make a bridge, and painted it blue to match their house. Aunt Barbie was still alive then, I had fewer cousins, and Uncle Ron held more bitterness in him than he does now; the empty place where her sweetness used to be left him alone in the house except for a small dog with wiry fur named Spot. She'd planted daffodils on the opposite side. They still bloom.

Bits of time there hang suspended in my head. Alison, the girl up the street who went to the Catholic school downtown, would play with me, a year older, a foot taller, and a convenient bike ride away. After working up a sweat playing cops and robbers, racing up the road to the skating rink parking lot as fast as our skinny knees could pump the pedals, we rode our bikes through the trees, straight to the edge of the water. In spring, we caught crayfish in the shade, getting out to warm our feet (prickled red with fresh cold) in the long-awaited sunshine. In summer, we sported bathing suits, moving slick stone chairs into the deep, slow-moving spots, and crushing mud together with ever-abundant laurel leaves into pretend dinner. In fall, the never-ending leaf litter drove us to worry, working around the clock to pull handfuls of soggy leaves from between rocks where the water was having trouble getting through; the water was low, and our expertise at staying dry grew as the days grew cold. In winter, we laid on our stomachs on the bridge to see if life still teamed below, or got brave enough to slide carefully onto the ice. Once I fell through and walked home in the snow with wet shoes.

On this day, Alison stayed at home for one reason or another. I played by myself in a muddy inlet where the water circled against the bank, flowed back to the center, and miraculously, for a short portion, flowed upstream against the current. I crouched there for hours, putting small twigs in the path of trickles, watching the water move around them. Tiny dams. I remember wondering if there was a job where I could do this all day long--divert rivers, change the course of everything.

There is a moment that is not a moment, but an underlying brother of time that has no beginning or end; a moment that draws across all the years of my life, all the seasons, all the rivers where I've sat. Staring at one spot for so long, the water is always the same, always different. It jumps in the same ways, splashes the same spots, dips and curves along the bottom of the bed with the same mannerisms all day long, but it never comes back, never needs to practice to get it right. A kind of memory exists within it.

One last glance over my shoulder showed the room completely empty but for a single crow, wet with rain, sifting through the white sheets like road kill. The emptiness of the bed was not unexpected. Besides curiosity, another feeling filled my chest, something like the way a feather gets swept back and forth on a long descent, suspended, unable to fall straight to the ground.

I awoke more tired than when I'd gone to bed. I rubbed my face, pausing to press the heels of my hands deep into my eye sockets, and tried to hold on to the vastness of my dreamscapes. Marveling at the speed at which they left me, the figures--even my own--faded like scenery after exiting a tunnel into bright sunlight, momentarily blinded by the glare of waking life.

"Just clutching at straws," I mumbled into my pillow, rolling over. I enjoyed the sound of my breaths being forced through the fabric every time I exhaled into the rosebud covered pillowcase. I found myself asking questions.

Where were we? Why was he hiding, too? Why is he always disappearing? But most importantly, why do I keep having dreams about him?

I prepared myself for a day of preoccupation with my nighttime adventures. Shaking them didn't come easily anymore, and the less I spoke with Mac the more I saw him in my dreams, often naked, and often the Mac I believed him to be, not the Mac I actually knew. His distance from me was calculated, methodical. Apparently I found this most intriguing since he held onto my thoughts each and every day (despite an acutely offended barrage of arguments feigning ignorance whenever confronted). The intimacy we shared weighed on me. I was trapped in the basement waiting for rescue, and he was the rubble of a collapsed building.

I pictured a fat man in a yellow construction hat circling him, looking him up and down, and finally slapping a pink slip of paper to his forehead that said, "Inspection Failed--Not Up To Code". I rolled back over and smiled at the ceiling.

The teachable moment wasn’t about making flashy displays or planning an activity overloaded with sensory stimulation.The teachable moment embraced tiny details—the first wildflower of spring, a salamander spotted through the glare of a creek’s surface, the call of a Great Horned Owl in winter darkness—and, like a dry forest in summer, the tiniest spark ignited my mind and spirit.The teachable moment celebrated the fleeting, the unique, the breathtaking; it gave a standing ovation to the miraculous, intricate face of the outdoors, all things great and small.What do I love most about the teachable moment?Instinct.It satisfies one’s natural wonder, a wonder that I believe exists no matter your age or upbringing, that only needs nurtured to be drawn out.

Karl opens the creaky door to the little wooden shack out in front of his spectacular home. Tucking the pillow case under my arm and following closely, I close the door behind me as I step down from the door jam onto a packed dirt floor scattered with corn kernels and other feed. Sunlight slants through the cracks in the walls. In a whistling flurry, pigeons scatter from our presence to the furthest corner of the small space, settled wing-to-wing on homemade perches, just above shoulder height. He holds the net above his head and quickly scoops up three of them. Diligently, I pop the pillow case open, stretching it between my two hands, and he carefully removes each bird from the net, untangling them and gently plopping them in the bottom of the cotton sack. When all three are in, I twist it shut slowly for fear of making them dizzy, and place my hand underneath them to help distribute the weight and keep them calm.

Karl and I pile into his old Ford pickup and I place the sack of pigeons on my lap. We bounce along roads that are no more than glorified hiking trails, making our way slowly up the mountain through beech, white pine, and hickory trees. Somewhere behind us, his dog Bess is following. Finally, we come to a small clearing and he parks the truck behind some bushes. In front of us is the crest of the mountain with a field of sorts beyond the last stand of trees. A south-facing slope in the early morning hours in April, overlooking parts of Centre County, Pennsylvania--a little warmer than down below where the trees block the sun, and the view is stunning. The Allegheny Front stretches out of sight to the right and left across the valley and a gentle wind is pushing up against my face from below. Perfect migration weather.

A bird blind is set up in the brush to my right. In the center of the clearing, a thin pole stands about six feet tall with a string running from the top to the ground about seven feet in front of it, making a triangle, with both ends of the string running to the blind to allow a person to pull the string back and forth, up and down, while hidden. We carry our supplies to the blind; me, with the pigeons, Karl with two, blue, metal, Folger's coffee cans that have been duct taped together with a hook on top to get the hanging weight. He's cut the bottom out of one to make it one long, cylindrical container. In his other hand, he has a large circular net, about four feet in diameter, with hinges in the middle so it can be bent backward into a half moon. We put everything but this into the blind, and he motions for me to come to the pole in the clearing with him, net in hand.

He places it on the ground between the two points where the string is thread. We fasten one side of the half-moon into the ground so that it doesn't pop up, and bend the other half back over itself, rigging a trip wire to the blind that can be pulled. After one or two successful practice pulls, he decides it's satisfactory. I have to stoop to get into the bird blind. Karl hands me a tiny leather vest, the perfect size for a pigeon. Keeping the pillow case tight around my arm, I feel around inside of it for one bird and, pinning its wings to its sides, carefully draw it out. I lay it on its back on my lap, pulling first one wing, then the other through the vest, lacing it around his chest. I hand the bird to Karl and he takes it out to the net, hooking the bird to the center of the string by the back of the vest. He motions for me to pull. I pick up the ends of the strings like reigns of a horse and yank my left and right hand in succession. The pigeon bounces up and down, flapping his wings in confusion. Karl gives me a thumbs up.

He joins me in the blind; we each have a five-gallon bucket to sit on and he picks up a pair of binoculars, pressing them against the one-way glass window.

"Now we wait," he says.

We are as still and quiet as we can be. Suddenly, Karl, the binoculars still at his eyes, reaches out and taps my left shoulder with his right hand. I peer out the window and see a shadow cross over the ground. I pull hard with my right, then my left, then back again, over and over, making the pigeon dance noisily. In an instant, a red-tailed hawk comes into view, soaring into the ground, hitting the pigeon full force and tumbling through the grass from the inertia. Karl snaps the trip line hard and fast. The large net springs open, covering the hawk and prey. He knocks over his bucket in his hurry to get out of the blind with me close at his heels, sprinting to get to the net before the struggling bird of prey pries it off the ground and flies away. The hawk is pinned down, having long ago released the pigeon, which is still trapped and panicking just out of reach of the long, black talons of his assailant. In a swift, speedy moment, Karl's hand shoots under the net and grabs the hawk by it's feet with his index and middle finger between them as a spacer.

"GAH!" he cries out, sharply.

Defiantly, a single talon has pierced the skin between his thumb and forefinger, traveling the whole way through and coming out the other side.

"Can you just... can you just carefully slide that out for me while I hold her?" he asks, calmly.

It takes all the strength in my hands to pry apart the birds toes and push the talon out through the hole it made.

Already forgotten, Karl ignores the wound, excited about the bird, which he now turns upside down so she hangs from her feet. She spreads her wings to their full span, puffs out the downy, white feathers on her throat, and with her mouth gaping, small pink tongue sticking straight out, hisses at us both. I smile. I reach out and stroke her sides gently, admiring the band of dark feathers across her belly, her golden eyes under the feather-covered, bony protrusions in her skull that act like little baseball caps, shading her eyes from the sun to help her hunt during the day, making her look oppressive and intimidating. We spend the next fifteen minutes weighing her (sliding her into the coffee cans and hanging her up), counting the primary and secondary feathers on her wings, determining her age, and taking in her irritated majesty. This bird is an adult and Karl is looking for a juvenile, so he lets me take her, toss her into the air, and watch her hurry away into the blue.

Afterward, I notice this pigeon is not flapping its wings at all when I pull it back and forth. I leave the blind to see if maybe I've restricted wing movement with the little vest, but find nothing. When I put the bird down to walk back to the blind, there are red droplets covering my hand. Turning around and bending over, I unlace the vest to find a perfect hole, just like the one in Karl's hand, in the center of the pigeon's chest. I remove him from the harness. Standing still in the middle of the clearing, I cup my hands around him and hold him belly up. With each blink, his eyes stay closed a little longer. His head hangs limply to one side. There's no fight or struggle to find freedom. Here, in my palms, I watch him pant desperately, filling up his little lungs only to have the sweet oxygen rush out of the wound. When he is finally still, I stay there for an unknown amount of time before Karl sticks his head out of the blind to see what's keeping me.

"Uh-oh," he says, bringing his shoulders out the door to get a better look at me. "You all right? Sometimes they don't all make it."

My mouth glued shut, I look up at him with nothing to say. I hold the bird out in front of me like an offering, taking unsteady steps toward Karl, hoping he'll handle it. He puts his hand on my shoulder and takes the bird. With a triumphant swing of his arm, he hurls it away into the bushes beneath the trees.

"Be a good meal for something."

I look after the bird and don't make any move toward the blind.

"Tell you what, let's call it a morning. You head home, and be back tomorrow at 8:30. We're gonna get us a hawk."

"We used to come every summer. Both of our dads had their company picnics here. We have to ride the haunted house. Oh, and the carousel!" I chatter excitedly.

"Carousel?" he looks at me sideways from the passenger seat. "Aren't we a little old for something like a carousel?"

"No! Not this one. See, there's this mechanical arm that they stick out halfway through the ride, you have to be on an outside horse so you can lean out, and there are these metal rings in the end of the arm that you snag off with your fingers. If you get the brass ring, you get a free ride. I remember riding it over and over to try and get the brass ring one year and Alison finally won," I say, my eyes clouding over in reminiscence. "I don't think I could even reach it, yet, but I claimed that outside horse, pet its mane, whispered something encouraging into his ear and stretched as far as I could," I laugh at myself.

I grin so hard that the muscles behind my ears hurt.

"I mean, we kept coming, even after her dad lost his job at Cerro. The Corning plant at home shut down soon after so my dad went to First Quality and their picnic is at Hershey. But yeah, we had to stop at that rest stop on I-80 because my car overheated on the way home one summer, we were probably 17 and 18. We rode the carousel then, too. It's tradition."

I park the car in the grass parking lot, hop out, and lock the doors. I skip to the walkway, turn around to grab his hand, and drag him along, hoping his attitude will brighten up once we ride a roller coaster or something.

We walk together like that, hand in hand, me one step ahead. Passing the Ferris wheel, the gravel crunches under our feet and a group of kids run by, soaked from the log flume. One bumps my side and doesn't turn around to apologize. I look after her, smiling, thinking about the first year we didn't have to walk with our parents anymore.

"Jesus, kids are obnoxious," he mumbles under his breath.

I slow my pace a bit, falling back into step with him, looking at him for a moment to see if he really is as unhappy as he sounds. He doesn't notice. He studies the lemonade stand shaped like a giant lemon, sweeps his eyes back and forth across the food stands and throngs of people uncomfortably. The carousel is just around the next outdoor restaurant.

I light up when I see it, my grin comes back and I forget he is unsure of himself, of everything. I let go of his hand, lope over to the end of the line, grab the iron fence and swing myself around the corner.

"Come on!" I call, motioning for him to join me.

He saunters over and leans in toward me.

"Can't we go on a roller coaster or something first? You know, something fun?" he spits the word at me.

Refusing defeat, I consider that maybe he just needs some time to warm up to the whole amusement park thing. I take him to the Phoenix, explaining how it was originally in an amusement part in Texas that someone dissembled and brought to Pennsylvania. He comes off smiling, running his mouth about the lap bars being too loose, afraid the whole ride that he might slip out of the seat at the crest of a hill.

"That's what makes it a good roller coaster. It was the first one I ever went on, and my dad had to put his arm around my shoulders to keep me in because I was so small," I poke him in the ribs and take his hand again. "Carousel?"

"He had to hold you in? Sounds real safe. Isn't there another roller coaster?"

"Yeah, one. We can do that first if you want, I guess."

So, we go to the Twister, another wooden roller coaster, but much newer than the Phoenix. We pass the North Pole Christmas store, full of kitschy ornaments and decorations, open all summer long. Out front is an ten-foot iron pole, cooled from the inside, covered in slick ice with a dozen kids crowding around to touch the miracle of ice in summer. I reach out over their heads and smear my own hand across it, happy.

"Gross," he says.

Arriving at the Twister, I count out our tickets and hand them to a deaf man in a Knoebel's polo shirt behind the counter. In a few moments, as the chain pulls us up the first hill, I explain how we were here the day this ride opened. We were in the fifth group of people to ride it and our train got stuck on the tracks. Casey comes off of this ride smiling too, rubbing his temple, asking what's next.

A short stroll later, I am back at the end of the line for the carousel. He hesitates nearby, then comes over and grabs my elbow, pulling me out.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"Do you see the kind of people that are in line for this ride?" his brow is down, shading his eyes.

I turn to look behind me, scanning the tittering children and several adults with babes in arms.

"I do," I say, turning back. "What's your point? It'll be fun! Come on!" I shake his hand off of my elbow and take his wrist. When I try to walk forward, he resists, leaning away from me to stand his ground.

"Come on!" I urge, growing irritated. "You can't seriously be so intimidated by a bunch of elementary school kids."

"That's not the point. We're too old for this."

"I'm not." I argue.

"Yes, you are, and so am I. It's just a stupid carousel."

Wounded, I scowl angrily and brush past him to sit on a bench outside the arcade.

"I don't know any guy in his mid-twenties that would ride this damn thing," he counters.

"Guess what? I do, and I'd rather be here with them at this point. You've been nothing but toxic all day long. We've only gone on two rides. If all you want to do is ride roller coasters, we might as well just get a candy apple and fucking peace out," I am near tears.

"I'm not going on this ride. We can ride something cool, but I'm not going on this."

I hung around in the kitchen as long as I could, not wanting to go. Bright white Christmas lights adorned the tree and walls and there was a mess of half-eaten casserole dishes splayed across the counters that said, "Family was here". Only a few of us remained, me at the sink scraping hardening chocolate out of a fondue pot, the others in a semi-circle in the dining area. After moving to the living room to eat and talk, the chocolate eventually burnt to the metal in the center where the flame blazed hottest. I worked slowly, taking layer after layer off, giving myself something to do, something that made me appear busy even though all my attention was with the conversations to my right. Maybe if I stayed quiet, time would forget to take me forward with it.

Earlier, when Kate played her guitar for us, an attentive stillness overcame the room, a collection of interwoven fates sitting on beige couches. We listened together and I felt at peace, but my throat was thick, my jaw clenched. I'd forgotten what it meant to belong to something. I didn't even know I belonged here until tonight. Two or three times over the course of the few hours we were there, someone made a comment with my name in it, involving me. Every time, it took me by surprise. Anomalies are anomalies because they cannot be explained. This peculiar family, this hodgepodge gen-ed English class of valedictorians and misfits, gathered in the home of our exuberant professor, kept something stationary in my chest that might have fallen apart otherwise. Maybe if I didn't move, time would forget to take me forward with it.

But time never forgets me; it treats me the same as any other. No matter where I withdraw to, time shadows me, and when Heather holds the door open for me, the windy darkness envelopes me and I leave the warm living room at my back. On the drive home, my contented heart floats weightlessly and my mind vainly seeks ways to hold onto this feeling. Gusts push my car from side to side, rain spatters indifferently on my windshield, oncoming headlights stretch for miles in the wet pavement, my tires drone ceaselessly. Like smoke, the more I grab at this feeling, the more dissipated it becomes, curling away into the night to become a memory.

The calcified shower head dribbled a few unevenly pressured streams onto the top of my head. My body was freezing, so I didn't waste any time. It was 7:30am, the Monday of the last week of September, and the temperature inside the bathhouse reflected the time of year. I quickly shampooed my hair, rinsed it as best I could with what little water I was afforded, and stepped out of the stall onto the concrete floor, my bare feet stinging from the cold. In my attempts to pack light, I didn't bring a full sized towel and now I was regretting this camper's super-absorbent nightmare that wasn't even big enough for me to wrap my hair in. After pulling on long johns, jeans, a few long sleeved shirts, and a vest, I hurriedly brushed my teeth and braided my hair into pigtails, topping it off with a bandana.

We all met at the mess hall at 8am, got our food and a last-minute recap of what would happen once the school arrived. By now we at least knew each others nature names, and I made sure to sit with Arugala. We ate most of our meals together that week. Just as we were placing our dishes on the counter in the kitchen, Palomino popped his head in the back doors to let us know the bus was on its way up the road. We ran outside, gathered in the gravel parking lot, and we all started clapping to a steady beat. As the bus came to a hissing stop, the door opened and kids began filing out. Several counselors were in charge of gathering bags and began piling them all along the road, while we sang:

"We welcome you to Outdoor School, we're really glad you're here!We'll send the air reverberating with a mighty cheer!We'll sing you in! We'll sing you out! We'll even raise a might shout,HOORAY!Hail, hail, the gang's all here, welcome to Outdoor School!"

Jumping, smiling, cheering, and high-fiving anyone within ten foot radius, we clapped kids on the back and ran with them to two parachutes that we'd laid out in the lawn before breakfast. Everyone had a spot on the perimeter, small fists clenching the nylon fabric, counselors peppered between kids to encourage and play. The leaders of this activity called out what we were to do, lifting the chute and yelling, "All the girls RUN!" or "Everyone find a new spot!". We ran, giggling while the parachute floated above our heads, a multicolored ceiling suspended by nothing and thrown there by our own hands. After the running, the leaders threw balls into each parachute and we popped them into the air, fifty kids playing catch with fifty other kids. I felt like one of them.

The rest of the week, the excitement level never dropped. Tuesday we took our Learning Groups (mixed-gender groups of 15-20 kids) out into the forest to teach them about resources and cycles. Each equipped with a compass, we taught them to orient themselves, finding Fred and putting Red in the Shed. Clues written on 3x5 note cards, stuck in the crotches of trees, littered the woods here and there with orienteering directions to another clue. Their shoes squelched on the walk back after splashing through a stream, turning over rocks and digging in mud to find macroinvertebrates, water insects, and sometimes, if a kid was fast enough, even a tiny fish. We used what we found to determine if the water quality was high or low. Pairing off, we played "Meet a Tree", blindfolding one of each couple so that the other could lead his or her partner by the hand, carefully navigating over rocks, stumps, and holes, to allow the blindfolded person to meet the tree, feeling the bark, maybe even smelling it. After their partners led them away again, zigzagging to throw them, kids pulled off their blindfolds and attempted to find the tree they met. Tuesday night, the campfire roared, and everyone sat on wooden benches, listening to Palomino serenade the night, and doubling over in laughter at the counselor's skits.

Wednesday we took them caving in Tytoona. In the van, we played minute mysteries: "A man is found in a tree in the middle of the forest wearing a scuba diving suit. There is no water for miles. What happened?" When we arrived, Finch took up the rear as sweep so no one fell behind, and we entered the large opening that was the mouth of the cave. Unlike touristy caves, there were no formations here in spectral lights that they turned off so you could get a taste of the true darkness of the underground. We all got a helmet with a light attached. As we got further in, the walls narrowed, forcing us to move into a single-file line and to walk in the middle of the water flowing along the floor. Soon, we were on our hands and knees, scraping our bellies and backs on logs that were lodged across the opening from floods, drenched from head to toe. Kids were scared--hell, I was scared--but pushed on. After wading through hip-deep pools as the stone opened up into a cavernous room, we helped each other out onto dry rock, found a place to sit, turned off our head lamps, and sat quietly for a few minutes. Before we knew it, a gentle, Native American flute filled the air, a surprise from our leader, echoing off of the walls, dancing in our ears to the beat of the water filtering through the ground above and dripping into the pool below. That night, after changing into dry clothes, we cavers relished in the warmth of fire and shared our different caving experiences from the day.

In the morning on Thursday, the kids attended either the Living Things lesson with the animals or the Then and Now Lesson, and switched to the other program in the afternoon. Their hands shot up into the air with questions about snakes and turtles, stories of finding them or saving them. Thinking they were sly, kids tried to get us to admit that we were their counselors, but we held fast to our pioneer names (Lucy, Jebediah) and went about our business, gathering what we needed from the land and showing how we used what we found. At an age where they hadn't quite let go of imagination, they narrowed their eyes curiously, feeling that we looked familiar, but not completely convinced we weren't these new characters from the past. After dinner, we surprised them with a hoedown. We spent our first day here, before they arrived, learning dances like Cotton Eye Joe to share with them. Kids lined up next to us and behind us, mimicking our kicks and spins, and jamming hardcore to the freestyle dance numbers. And we put dessert on the line. If three democratically chosen campers could beat three democratically chosen counselors in a dance contest, we would let them have chocolate chip brownies. As always, the campers win, and Palomino addresses the unruly crowd with chocolate smeared all around his mouth, explaining that it was his mistake and there was no dessert. Bombarded by objections, accusations, and fingers pointing to the guilt all over his face, he finally admits that yes, he was trying to keep them for himself, we caught him, and the brownies are carried out on plates, one for each child, and they are ecstatic. That night at the campfire, Palomino tells the tale of the Lorax.

Friday morning, we are all called to a meeting, even the kids. Counselors look at each other, shrugging, concerned looks on their faces, asking, "What's going on?" As we take our seats, a man in a suit and tie walks to the front of the room, smiling. Palomino reluctantly introduces him as Mr. Moneysworth, who has an announcement for us.

"Hello, and thank you for having me here today! You see, I came to let you know that I just purchased the land that this camp sits on. My plan to change Camp Blue Diamond, trust me, will be something you're very interested in! That dirty lake at the end of the road? We're going to make that a giant swimming pool. Those tiny cabins you've been sleeping in? Well, we'd like to see those torn down and replaced by a luxurious hotel! Of course we'd need to make room for a parking lot, so that grove of trees across the lawn will have to go. But trust me! It will be better than any resort you've ever been to! Everyone will want to come here," he spouts.

Kids turn their heads to their friends, some whisper to each other, a few are even crying. One girl looks up at me and says, "Do something."